Cost of Misalignment: Getting Sales, Marketing and management on the Same Page for Business Growth

When delivering strategies for growing privately-held and family businesses, the alignment between sales, marketing, and management is one of the critical factors to get right if we are to achieve ambitious growth targets. According to recent studies, companies with aligned sales and marketing teams achieve 32% higher revenue growth. Misalignment, on the other hand, can lead to wasted resources, missed opportunities, and ultimately, stunted growth.

Key Components

Unified Revenue Goals: Management, sales and marketing teams should work towards common revenue goals. Combining top down with bottom up planning will ensures that all efforts are directed towards the same outcomes, while fostering joint accountability. For example, Adobe’s shift to a unified “revenue team” model increased their qualified leads by 10%.
Buyer-Centric Journey: Focus on the buyer’s journey to ensure that sales and marketing efforts align with customer needs at every stage. Slack’s approach to optimising their buyer journey reduced their sales cycle by 30%.
Advanced Technology Integration: Utilise CRM platforms, marketing automation systems, and AI-powered analytics to align processes and resourcing. Shopify’s integration of CRM and marketing platforms improved their conversion rates by 25%.

Top Three Tips to Share with Clients

Regular Alignment Meetings: Alignment meetings take practice and time, and they are not a rigid undertaking. Keep working and adjusting until you get it right for your teams, focusing on setting shared goals, reviewing progress, and addressing challenges efficiently. High-performing companies are 21% more likely to hold weekly alignment meetings.
Shared Content: Develop a shared content library that both sales and marketing teams can access. This ensures that all team members are using consistent messaging and materials. Nip it in the bud quickly when people start their own libraries.
Cross-Functional Training: Invest in cross-functional training programs to help sales and marketing teams understand each other’s roles and challenges. The people and the skill sets are very different so knowledge sharing can build broader capabilities across both teams, or at least some empathy and for what each team brings.

Key Questions to Get the Conversation Started

What are your current revenue goals, and how are sales and marketing contributing to them?
How well do your sales and marketing teams communicate and collaborate on lead generation and conversion?
What tools and technologies are you using to track and analyse the performance of your sales and marketing efforts?

By addressing these questions, partners can help their clients uncover areas of misalignment and develop strategies to improve collaboration between sales and marketing teams. This alignment not only enhances operational efficiency but also drives sustainable business growth.

References